The Bank of England’s wide-ranging Future of Finance report provides a forward-looking view across topics such as the emergence of a “cash-lite” economy, data standards, artificial intelligence, cloud, digital identity, demographic changes, and the transition to a low carbon economy. Lead author Huw van Steenis (formerly Special Adviser to Governor Mark Carney, and now Senior Advisor to the CEO at UBS) discusses the report’s key findings, and the implications for policy settings and modernizing regulation.

Recorded during the IIF Annual Membership Meeting (where he also presented a special briefing on the report), Huw highlights the emerging trends in payments and the longer-term implications for competition and discusses the barriers to cloud adoption and the opportunities presented by RegTech and SupTech initiatives. He also considers the outlook for central bank digital currencies, and where that activity has been galvanized in recent months by Facebook’s Libra initiative.